OctaneRender™ 2.1 for LightWave™ - Daily builds

[juanjgon]

In this post you have the last daily build of the OctaneRender™ 2.1 for LightWave™ plugin, available to all commercial license users. The advantage of this is that users can update as often as they like to the latest versions of Octane. Bug fixes and small enhancements are continually committed to the current versions of of the Lightwave plugin.

Due to the switch to CUDA 6.5 you will need a current graphics driver of version 344.x or higher.
On Mac OSX you will need a CUDA driver of version 6.5 or higher (see http://www.nvidia.com/object/mac-driver-archive.html).

This daily build includes the release of the LightWave 2015 plugin, with support for the FiberFX hair systems.
http://render.otoy.com/manuals/Lightwave3D/?page_id=602

This should be the stable release of the 2.1x development cycle. If there are no more major issues, we will release this build as production build with the demo versions in few days.


These are the links to the last plugin build (Windows and OSX): RELEASE 2.16.0 - 23/Dec/2014
http://render.otoy.com/customerdownload ... indows.zip
http://render.otoy.com/customerdownload ... .0_OSX.zip

The sample scenes:
http://render.otoy.com/customerdownload ... Scenes.zip

Standalone version for the network rendering nodes: Version 2.16
http://render.otoy.com/customerdownload ... _win64.zip
http://render.otoy.com/customerdownload ... _macos.dmg



Changes since the last production release (2.12.0):

* NEW FEATURES:
- Reduced the brightness of the daylight environment by a factor of 0.6 for the new daylight model and 0.8 for the old model. This way there is a better match between the texture environment and the daylight environment. Or in other words: Exteriors rendered with the default exposure settings are less overexposed than before. Older scenes will be converted automatically and should render the same.
- Changed the default turbidity of the daylight environment to 2.4 to reduce the contrast between the sun and sky light.
- Improved object motion blur on objects with translation + rotation and only two key frames.
- Added option "Cast illumination" to emitter nodes. Disabling this option will disable emission, i.e. it won't be visible in diffuse reflections, but still be fully visible in specular reflections. It will also be excluded from the direct light calculation.
- The emission sampling rate can now be set to 0, which means that the emitter will be excluded from the direct light calculation.
- The ISO and FStop parameters are deprecated in the imager node. The exposure/iso/fstop settings of the old scenes are converted internally to the new exposure value.
- Added option "Surface brightness" to emitter nodes. Enabling this option will cause emitters to keep the surface brightness constant independent of the emitter surface area, i.e. the total emitted power will be dependent on the emitter surface area. The scaling is done in a way that a texture emitter will produce the same colour in the rendering (if the diffuse channel is black), when the camera response curve is set to "Linear/off", exposure to 1, gamma to 2.2 and vignette to 0. Disabling the option will keep the total emission power constant, i.e. the surface brightness will become dependent on the emitter surface area.
- Added option "Surface brightness" to the Octane light.
- Scaled exposure in the camera imager so that a texture environment produces the specified colour in the rendering, if the camera response curve is set to "Linear/off", exposure to 1, gamma to 2.2 and vignette to 0. The exposure of older scenes will be converted automatically.
- Added pin "Invert" to the polygon side texture, which will flip its behaviour.
- Automatic default sequential UV map for the FiberFX hair systems without UV data (base objects without UV maps, or hair systems from guides). This UV map can be used for example to random shade the hairs without problems in an animated sequence.
- Added new texture node "PolygonSide" which renders white on the front face and black on the backface of a polygon. You can use this to do backface culling (by putting this texture into the opacity channel) or to allow double-sided materials (placing it into a mix material) and textures (placing it into a mix texture).
- Added diffuse roughness parameter to the diffuse material node.
- New parameter in the Debug tab of the plugin options panel "Enable Statistics Collection". If enabled, anonymous render statistics are collected. See the 2.14 Standalone release notes.
- New parameter in the render passes node to export the passes as EXR half precision floats (16bit floating point numbers).
- Replaced "coherent mode" with a float parameter "coherent ratio", which allows you to blend between non-coherent rendering (0) and "super-coherent" rendering (1). Please be aware that for values above 0.4 you will usually need a few thousand samples per pixel to get rid of visible artifacts and values above 0.5 hardly ever make any sense.
- New plugin release for LightWave 2015.
- Support of the Layout FiberFX rendering in LightWave 2015. Support of the hair shading using the FiberFX node editor, linking the Octane materials to the root node hair "Material" input.
- In LightWave 2015, support of rendering sequences by range using the native LW range global settings. The old workaround to support range rendering with the settings in the rendering target has been removed in the 2015 plugin build.
- Alembic exporter now has a new option to export also a complete animated .orbx file to be used in the Standalone, including animated cameras, animated objects transformations and deformations and all material settings.
- Support of animated UV maps and animated parameters in the UVMAP node without reload the scene for each frame.
- Switched to CUDA 6.5
- Improved performance of Maxwell 2 GPUs (GTX 970 and GTX 980)
- Speed up processing of HDR textures which should reduce the delay when a scene with many HDR textures is loaded on the GPU.
- Added motion vector render pass.
- Added new option "AO alpha shadows" to info channel kernel. If enabled, opacity is now taken into account in the AO calculation.
- Added option "AO alpha shadows" to the render passes node.
- New feature to export the scene to an alembic .abc file while rendering the sequence with F10. This alembic file can store all the geometry information, the geometry animation and the camera parameters and animation. There is a new tab in the render target root node panel to support this new export feature. The export to .abc file is only avaliable in update scene mode.
- New tool in the render passes node to configure the file name while rendering sequence files.
- Coherent mode is now always disabled for the IPR rendering.
- Full support of deformations motion blur in "Update scene" mode. Frame reloading is no longer needed to render objects with deformations motion blur.

* BUGS FIXED:
- Fixed broken UV transform when texture nodes share the same projection node.
- Fixed bug that caused slaves "to lose samples"
- Fixed matte material which ignored the "shadow visibility" of object layer nodes
- Fixed broken auto-focus if focal depth is set to 0
- The hide flag doesn't work with the Octane lights, they are always displayed in the viewports. Fixed.
- The octane nodes context menus crash Layout if used without enable the plugin. This functions can't work without the plugin, but the crash is fixed now.
- Wrong link of the "T" layers in the Diffuse material. Fixed.
- Fixed broken rendering in clay mode
- Fixed incorrect rendering of Fresnel reflection on glossy materials with bump/normal maps.
- Fixed a kernel hang in displacement in certain situations.
- Fixed a bug in network rendering that could cause slaves to crash.
- OpenEXR images are now always saved via the OpenEXR library instead of FreeImage to circumvent the maximum file size of 4GB.
- OpenEXR files that are larger than 2GB can now be loaded.
- Fixed crash when you were trying to export an empty Alembic file.
- Fixed picking, which worked only randomly in 2.13.
- Fixed incorrect warning of invalid daemon sub-net.
- Instance objects with the IPR in pause mode crash or hangs Layout after continue rendering. Fixed.
- Layout crash while working with the Graph Editor in scenes that have objects with deformations. Fixed.
- Alembic export times are broken. Fixed.
- FiberFX hair is not updated while rendering sequeces in "update scene" mode. Fixed.
- FiberFX in update mode lose the UV information. Fixed.
- Crash if one object has very long names (> 150 characters) in the layers. Fixed.
- Crash in scenes with objects that have degenerated or not valid polygons when this objects are used in simulations, deformations, particles and so on. Fixed with a new polygons filtering code.
- Bad report of memory statistics in the LWSN nodes. Fixed
- The contrast value in the color correction node is not saved in the object files. Fixed.
- IPR Material picking 'through' objects flagged as hidden to camera or 100% dissolve doesn't seem to work as intended. Fixed
- Distributed ray tracing flag is not working in the infochannel render passes node. The AO pass doesn't show MB or DOF. Fixed.
- Fixed displacement "cracks"
- Fixed memory leak when environment importance sampling is used.
- Fixed incorrect sampling when multiple GPUs with mixed render priorities are used.
- Fixed emitter sampling of animated meshes.
- Fixed mix material in the AO/wireframe info channel kernels.
- Fixed material and texture preview.
- Fixed incorrect weighting of environment and light shadows on the matte material.
- Daemon search sub-net is now loaded correctly from the preferences.
- If you hit F9 Octane still renders arbitrary instead just current frame. Fixed.


-Juanjo

[vipvip]

thanks for this

[juanjgon]

thanks for this
MB Deformations preview will be usefull...

Deformations MB in the IPR window is not possible in LightWave. The SDK doesn't support the time evaluation of the deformations out of the rendering context (F9/F10) ... perform this operation in the live Layout context can be dangerous and prone to crash the whole application.

-Juanjo

[vipvip]

oops sorry, i didn't read correctly...

[FrankPooleFloating]

Juanjo, the Samples: are not updating in IPR while having anything but Beauty in Passes pull-down menu selected...It just shows zero.. this normal?

And what happened new to Matte?.. . What is "Fixed incorrect weighting of environment and light shadows on the matte material."?... still looks exactly the same as before from what I can tell...

Also, is it possible for you to make the save function from IPR able to save the current pass we are viewing from pulldown?.. So that if I am viewing materialID in IPR, I could save it just as if I was looking at Beauty?.... This could really be a time-saver if possible (for testing or quickie-renders).

EDIT: Or, if you could pop Passes/InfoChanels into Layers for F9s, and we could save out various Passes or InfoChannels from there, that would rock... Or is this just not possible?

[geo_n]

What does this mean?
- Fixed incorrect weighting of environment and light shadows on the matte material.

Even octane lights are casting shadows on matt shadow materials even if they were set not to cast shadows. Same issue I had with the reflection cards with cast shadow unchecked. There's no way to use octane for lightwave scene with dome environment.

[vipvip]

Actualy, when rendering with octane on my 4960K 6cores 12 threads, CPU is used with 9-11% during the rendering stage ( i don't talk about the scene update process which can use some cpu ressources ) which means almost one core is used for the octane-rendering process: i don't remember it was the case on older plugin versions but perhaps i'm wrong...
Otherwise all is ok as far as i've tested on different projects and it is a real pleasure to work with...

[juanjgon]

What does this mean?
- Fixed incorrect weighting of environment and light shadows on the matte material.

I am not sure what this mean. It is a fix in the Octane core, probably requested by other plugins or Standalone users.

-Juanjo

[juanjgon]

Actualy, when rendering with octane on my 4960K 6cores 12 threads, CPU is used with 9-11% during the rendering stage ( i don't talk about the scene update process which can use some cpu ressources ) which means almost one core is used for the octane-rendering process: i don't remember it was the case on older plugin versions but perhaps i'm wrong...
Otherwise all is ok as far as i've tested on different projects and it is a real pleasure to work with...

Usually one core may be used by the plugin to get the preview rendered image, build the LW preview raster data (for F9) or the OpenGL raster data (for the IPR), draw the preview image and the rendering information and manage the events. So yes, this behavior can be right.

[vipvip]

Actualy, when rendering with octane on my 4960K 6cores 12 threads, CPU is used with 9-11% during the rendering stage ( i don't talk about the scene update process which can use some cpu ressources ) which means almost one core is used for the octane-rendering process: i don't remember it was the case on older plugin versions but perhaps i'm wrong...
Otherwise all is ok as far as i've tested on different projects and it is a real pleasure to work with...

Usually one core may be used by the plugin to get the preview rendered image, build the LW preview raster data (for F9) or the OpenGL raster data (for the IPR), draw the preview image and the rendering information and manage the events. So yes, this behavior can be right.

thanks for your answer. In fact i was talking about F10 rendering but after a new check, it is perhaps due to the fact i'm actually rendering animations with instances+displacement+high-res-geometries sothat it takes some CPU ressources at the begining and as the numbber of samples is low ( 100 ), the windows-ressources CPU monitoring don't have the time to decrease ( when reaching 90-100 samples it decreases around 4-5 % )